Soprano

News

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Sarah Angliss, drummer Stephen Hiscock and singer Sarah Gabriel will launch the new Air Loom album at Kings Place on Saturday 30th March.

An evening of electrical mysticism, composer, instrumentalist and inventor Sarah Angliss brings you dreamlike music, featuring her phantasmagoria of music machines. Angliss performs live with Stephen Hiscock, percussionist of EnsembleBash and vocalist Sarah Gabriel. A newly-built Clavisembalum, Robotic carillons, telephonic counterpoint and a new instrument made from the salvaged parts of a Welsh chapel organ are in the mix.

Sarah joins Club Inégales on 1st November to open their ‘defiant, exciting and exploratory’ autumn season, The Uncertain Hour, with ‘For Those That Come Later’, singing the songs of Kurt Weill with the lyrics of Bertolt Brecht with the fantastic club band, Notes Inégales.

In early 1930s Berlin, artists in underground nightclubs satirised and dissected the political maelstrom in the streets above and stage collaborators Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill captured the febrile, furious, subversive, decadent, fearful state of Weimar Germany – and the human condition. Seamlessly transforming theatre and song in Europe, and then across the Atlantic to Broadway in their tumultuous lifetimes, the legacies of this poet and composer somehow feel more relevant than ever.

On 22nd June, Sarah made her writer-director debut with her play, A House on Middagh Street, commissioned by the Britten-Pears Foundation for performance at the Pumphouse during the Aldeburgh Festival. This immersive performance is set in the house in Brooklyn where Benjamin Britten, WH Auden, Carson McCullers and Gypsy Rose Lee lived during the Second World War in an extraordinary creative maelstrom, where novels (including the pulp classic, The G-String Murders), operas and poems were written, but the washing up never got done.

Premiered at the Pumphouse Aldeburgh, Aldeburgh Festival 2018
Written & directed by Sarah Gabriel
Produced by the Britten-Pears Foundation

Dorothy Parker Takes a Trip is a one-act solo play, commissioned by and created for Dartington International Festival and premiered in August 2016. The show has since been revived at Oxford Playhouse and Petworth Festival and will appear at Presteigne Festival in 2019.

Co-created with Sarah Gabriel and director Richard Williams, this is a story about Dorothy Parker’s immense wit, talent and her complicated life, with songs by Harold Arlen, George Gershwin, Milton Babbitt, Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael and others. Also featuring Dorothy Parker’s lawyer’s assistant and a filing cabinet.

Sarah has been selected with 11 other actors for the annual Poel Event: working on performing Shakespeare with legendary director David Thacker, Jeannette Nelson, Head of Voice at The National Theatre and Barrie Rutter, founder of the Northern Broadsides. The final day at the end of the month will be on the Olivier stage at the National Theatre.

Sarah will sing Berlin Cabaret songs with the celebrated and innovative pianist, Joanna MacGregor in a late-night concert in The Great Hall, Dartington on 20th August.

With clarinettist Steve Dummer, Sarah and Joanna will explore the golden age of cabaret: the songs of ebullient, febrile, decadent and subversive Berlin in the Weimar era of the 1920s and 30s, where artistes in underground nightclubs dissected the political maelstrom in the streets above.

The legacy of the endlessly inventive composers and performers lives on, sinuously transforming song across Europe and on Broadway too, although many of the composers themselves – seen as ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis – did not survive the war that followed. To include songs by Kurt Weill, Mischa Spoliansky, Friedrich Hollaender (The Blue Angel), Erwin Schulhoff and Ernst Krenek (Jonny spielt auf).

Sarah Gabriel, author Lucy Hawking, director Richard Williams and composer and music director Joseph Atkins are developing their new project, Fly Me to the Moon, exploring the music that astronauts have taken with them on their journeys to space, as well as exploring and explaining what they get up to when they get up there.

A feast of letters of note, moments of historical interest, stunning imagery and beautiful music, (including favourite nursery rhymes and mash-ups of David Bowie, Schumann, Schoenberg, Schubert) along with one or two special guests.